2014 sets record as Earth keeps heating up
Humankind’s impact on the planet hit an ugly milestone as researchers from two federal agencies announced yesterday that 2014 was Earth’s hottest year in recorded history.
The announcement grabbed headlines around the world but didn’t surprise scientists who have been studying climate change.
The planet has been steadily getting warmer since people first started recording average temperatures in 1880. But in the past 30 years, average temperatures have increased more
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rapidly.
And scientists at both NASA and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration— the two agencies that announced their findings yesterday— agree that Earth’s warming is driven mostly by humans.
Climate change is “dominated by human emissions,” said Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. “The data shows quite clearly that it’s the greenhouse-gas trends that are responsible for the majority of the (warming) trends.”
Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, absorb infrared radiation and radiate heat in all directions in the atmosphere. Burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil is one source.
The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1997, research shows.
Continued global warming could have grave consequences, scientists warn. Coastal regions could be swamped by rising sea levels. Extreme weather — hurricanes, monsoons and tornadoes — could cause deaths and property loss more often. Droughts could make growing food difficult.
And even though Ohio was relatively cool last year, the state is not immune.
“Ohio is definitely going to get warmer,” said David Bromwich, a climatologist and meteorologist in Ohio State University’s department of geography. “Let’s talk about summer: We’ll probably see more extreme temperatures, so more very hot days. ... The winters, we probably won’t get the very, very cold blasts that we saw last winter. Instead of snow, we’ll probably see freezing rain more frequently.”
This year, representatives of about 200 governments will meet in Paris to try to forge a deal to limit global warming.
Any approach to cutting greenhouse gases will likely include a menu of policies at the state, federal and international levels, said Juscelino Colares, a professor at Case Western Reserve University’s law school who has studied litigation and regulation involving greenhouse-gas emissions.
Ohio gets about 60 percent of its energy from coal. In 2008, the state enacted a law to improve energy efficiency and increase the amount of energy that comes from renewable sources, including wind and solar energy. But Gov. John Kasich signed a bill last year that put a two-year stop on those standards.
Joel Barker, an assistant professor in OSU’s School of Earth Sciences who has researched climate change, has a suggestion for those who believe that climate change is a natural phenomenon unaffected by humans: Recognizing that the world is getting warmer and understanding that something needs to be done about it are more important than arguing about the cause.
“I always sort of fall back on the burninghouse analogy,” he said. “If your house is on fire, the first thing you do is you try to do something about the fire. You don’t sit around saying, ‘ Who started the fire?’
“If we’re willing to just keep on going as we are, of course, the damage is just going to get worse and worse and worse as time goes on. Or we can note that the damage has been done, and we can try to limit the extent of that damage in the future.”
Information from the Associated Press was included in this story.